For today, One Year Bible Online links here.
When you stop learning you start losing knowledge. No one ever knows so much that they cannot improve by learning even more. Even if that was possible our minds are built so that when we stop adding to our knowledge we start to forget the things we already knew.
If we serve God He will arm us for the battles He wishes us to fight. When our enemies are God’s enemies they will fall before us and no one will answer their cry for help. We do not need to seek revenge against our enemies because God will repay those who harm us. God will hold us safe and subdue those who fight us because we serve God.
The first phrase of this passage is a great conclusion to the subject Paul has been covering for the last few days. I have been talking about how Paul tells us that if we sin we are allowing our sinful nature to control us and if our sinful nature controls us the Spirit is not in us. And yet, who among us has the strength to resist temptation day in and day out. So, here Paul tells us that the Spirit will help us in our weakness. Paul uses the example of prayer, but the help the Spirit will give us extends to helping us resist temptation. If we allow the Spirit, He will help us overcome other temptations as well. We just need to listen to the Spirit’s prompting and do the things which He tells us we should be doing. As we do the righteous things which the Spirit tells us to do we will find that we do not have time to do the things which our sinful nature tells us to do.
Using his example of how the Holy Spirit helps us pray, Paul then transitions to a new topic. He tells us that we often do not know what to pray for and about. However, the Spirit knows and helps us do so. There are times when we just need to cry out to God and allow the Spirit to convey our needs. God knows our hearts and knows what the Spirit is saying on our behalf. We can be confident that God will listen to this pleading on our behalf and know that He will cause all things to work together for the good of those who love Him. So, if God is working to make all things work together for our good (we do love the Lord, don’t we?), then what do we have to fear from others? After all, if God is for us, who can be against us? (Yes, I know, lots of people, but they can do nothing which God does not allow.)
God has made us right with Him. He has taken the actions necessary to bridge the divide between us caused by our sin. He did this because of His great love for us and there is no power on earth, in heaven, or anywhere else which is capable of separating us from God’s love. I will conclude this with Paul’s statement on the issue:
“Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.”
After the northern tribes rebelled against Rehoboam and made Jeroboam their king, the priests and Levites all moved south. They did this because Jeroboam replaced them with priests of his own choosing. The result of Jeroboam’s actions and the actions of the Levites was that those people in the Northern Kingdom who genuinely wanted to worship and serve God moved to the territory controlled by Rehoboam.